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Tuesday, April 29, 2014

One of the things the missus and I do to avoid becoming TV zombies is try new board games. We don't have a big budget or a games library nearby, but fortunately we have interesting friends, who have their own collections of interesting titles. We regularly play the ever-popular Carcassonne, Zombies!!!, and Settlers of Catan, but recently we've had a chance to try a few interesting new ones:

Designed by "Settlers" maker Klaus Teuber, this Norse-flavoured game revolves around resource collecting quests and building items for victory points. Each player plays as a different character, with a few unique strengths and bonuses, so it's a little like a "canned" RPG. During each turn you venture forth from town towards an objective square, drawing cards to see if each square you pass through allows free travel, or requires you to fight an enemy or perform a risky task to proceed. Resources gained from quests are used to brew potions to help your character, or build items for different merchants in town, and the first player to make 10 items wins. There's an "XP" system too so your character can buff their abilities over the course of the game (unless you suck at it, like I did). Lots of fun, and not too hard to learn either.

This is a railway building game that can require you to be pretty sneaky in plain sight of your opponents. You collect same-coloured train car cards in your hand to build stretches of track between cities across a map of Europe and Russia (there are, of course, different geographical sets). Each player has secret objective cards ("Destination Tickets") for long multi-track stretches that they can complete for extra points, while trying to discern their competitors' objectives and disrupt them. At the end whoever completes the most objectives and has the longest tracks wins. This is by far the easiest of these three games to learn, but it has some intense play mechanics and a good balance of skill and luck.

My wife bought this for herself as a birthday gift. Wow. I'm pretty sure this is the most complicated board game ever made. The board consists of six interlocking gears, based on the cyclical Mayan/Aztec calendar. Briefly, you place and remove worker pieces on the gears, paying corn to place them and collecting benefits when you remove them. The thing is, the gears MOVE every turn, so where you place your worker is not where they end up a few turns later. There's a "buy low, sell high" dynamic in how/when workers are placed/removed, but where the game gets really nuts is how this interacts with the temple tracks (points for pleasing the gods), technology tracks (bonuses and multipliers to boost your resources), and buildings and monuments (a bunch of other stuff). We haven't even played a full game yet, and it took me 40 minutes just to set up the board (probably incorrectly) so I won't even pretend to say I understand it. But it looks challenging and fun once you learn it.

Sunday, April 20, 2014

The quasi-humanoid, photosynthetic Garafraxians (colloquially called "Chloros") use heavy armour to protect their fragile bodies during combat. Their long eye stalks give them excellent depth perception and peripheral vision however, so they generally extend them out of their suits except when in immediate danger. The suits are lined with red-LED arrays to maintain their metabolism far away from their home star's nourishing rays.

We have another baby on the way... arriving in only a few weeks now,
whoa! So I expect that I'll be posting pretty sporadically for a
while. But just like last time, I'll be back, so stay tuned :)

I did want to squeeze in at least one more fun project before our due date, however. I
wasn't sure what to do with these cool Shia Khan Pioneers when I ordered them,
but once I got a good look at them I knew I couldn't not convert them into
something weirder.

As Chloro shock troops poured in from the docking ring, Fett found himself
in the uncomfortable position of fleeing away from his ride off the station.

Kind of a goofy B-movie look here, but I like it. All I really did was stick in wires with drops of epoxy on the ends, and sculpt the tentacle/pincer things over their human hands. Well within my constraints of talent, fortunately.

Monday, April 07, 2014

The Zin Envoy was Ion Age's limited edition mini from this February. I'm surprised at how fast I got this mini done... by my standards at least. Anyway it's a great figure, alas now unavailable but if you have one, have a go at it. I really tried to glam him up, and so it was a lot of fun to paint.

The Ambassador has a stroke of luck - a Very Strange Alien appears just
as he needs to send an urgent encrypted message to the homeworld.